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October 15, 2007

Krugman Hearts Big Al (Now, Anyway)

Paul Krugman, in his biweekly burst of disingenuity, sings a song of love to Al Gore, incidentally bashing conservatives in the process:

Gore Derangement Syndrome

By PAUL KRUGMAN

On the day after Al Gore
shared the Nobel Peace Prize, The Wall Street Journal’s editors
couldn’t even bring themselves to mention Mr. Gore’s name. Instead,
they devoted their editorial to a long list of people they thought
deserved the prize more.

And at National Review Online, Iain Murray suggested that the prize
should have been shared with “that well-known peace campaigner Osama
bin Laden, who implicitly endorsed Gore’s stance.” You see, bin Laden
once said something about climate change — therefore, anyone who talks
about climate change is a friend of the terrorists.

What is it about Mr. Gore that drives right-wingers insane?

Oh, maybe we just don't like the guy. But Krugman has a theory!

Partly it’s a reaction to what happened in 2000, when the American
people chose Mr. Gore but his opponent somehow ended up in the White
House. Both the personality cult the right tried to build around
President Bush and the often hysterical denigration of Mr. Gore were, I
believe, largely motivated by the desire to expunge the stain of
illegitimacy from the Bush administration.

And now that Mr. Bush has proved himself utterly the wrong man for
the job — to be, in fact, the best president Al Qaeda’s recruiters
could have hoped for — the symptoms of Gore derangement syndrome have
grown even more extreme.

The worst thing about Mr. Gore, from the conservative point of view,
is that he keeps being right. In 1992, George H. W. Bush mocked him as
the “ozone man,” but three years later the scientists who discovered
the threat to the ozone layer won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In 2002
he warned that if we invaded Iraq, “the resulting chaos could easily
pose a far greater danger to the United States than we presently face
from Saddam.” And so it has proved.

2000? C'mon, we loathed Mr. "No Controlling Legal Authority" long before Florida. But let's move on to Krugman's disingenuous intellectual history of the environmental movement (emphasis added):

Consider the policy implications of taking climate change seriously.

“We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals,”
said F.D.R. “We know now that it is bad economics.” These words apply
perfectly to climate change. It’s in the interest of most people (and
especially their descendants) that somebody do something to reduce
emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, but each
individual would like that somebody to be somebody else. Leave it up to
the free market, and in a few generations Florida will be underwater.

The solution to such conflicts between self-interest and the common
good is to provide individuals with an incentive to do the right thing.
In this case, people have to be given a reason to cut back on
greenhouse gas emissions, either by requiring that they pay a tax on
emissions or by requiring that they buy emission permits, which has
pretty much the same effects as an emissions tax. We know that such
policies work: the U.S. “cap and trade” system of emission permits on
sulfur dioxide has been highly successful at reducing acid rain.

Krugman then proposes two simple market-oriented solutions - taxes, or cap-and-trade schemes. However, in my world the environmental movement was hijacked in the 1970's by the statists and socialists who loathed business, disliked markets, and wanted to make the government the center of all economic activity. In my world, taxes and cap-and trade were anathema for quite some time - the accepted solution to every economic problem was government regulation.

Support for my position (as well as some lovely Gore-bashing) can be found in the writings of that distinguished Princeton economist Paul Krugman. From Slate, circa 1997, in a discussion of market-oriented approaches to environmentalism:

It used to be that the big problem in formulating a sensible environmental policy
came from the left--from people who insisted that since pollution is evil,
it is immoral to put a price on it. These days, however, the main problem
comes from the right--from conservatives who, unlike most economists, really
do think that the free market is always right--to such an extent that they
refuse to believe even the most overwhelming scientific evidence if it
seems to suggest a justification for government action.

1990 was a good year for that left-right transition, or so we infer from this Gore bashing appraisal of "Earth in the Balance" (1998):

The book contains
a chapter, lamentably titled "Eco-nomics," that perpetuates the
oddly popular myth that conventional economic theory is constitutionally
incapable of dealing with environmental problems. "Many popular textbooks
on economic theory fail even to address subjects as basic to our economic
choices as pollution or the depletion of natural resources," Gore
declares. Actually, I have all the leading introductory texts on my shelf
(I'm writing one myself and am trying to steal my competitors' ideas),
and every one has an extensive section on environmental issues. One looks
in vain in Gore's book for even a mention of the fundamentals of standard
environmental economics: pollution as the prime example of an "externality"
(a social cost that the market does not properly value), and the standard
recommendation that externalities be corrected with pollution taxes or
tradable emission permits. (I wrote about the economics of environmentalism
in Slate last year, in "'Earth
in the Balance Sheet.") Since these concepts have actually
made their way from theory into practice, one wonders how he missed them.
The introduction of tradable permits was an important feature of the 1990
revision of the Clean Air Act, for example, and both fees and permits have
been crucial in efforts to protect the ozone layer.

That doesn't seem quite fair - Al did push for the BTU tax in 1993, although a nominally Dem-controlled Senate spurned it. And the Kyoto Protocol did have provisions for carbon trading although memory, that uncertain servant, tells me Europeans dropped their objections to the Clean Development Mechanism after the US had dropped out under Bush in 2001.

But let me not stray from my point - right or wrong, back in 1998 Krugman thought Al Gore's intersection of economics and environmentalism was comical. So did I, then and now - let's hand the mike to Bjorn Lomborg, the Skeptical Environmentalist himself, who wrote this in response to Gore's Nobel Prize:

The number of hungry people depends much less on climate than on
demographics and income. Extremely expensive cuts in carbon emissions
could mean more malnourished people. If our goal is to fight
malnutrition, policies like getting nutrients to those who need them
are 5,000 times more effective at saving lives than spending billions
of dollars cutting carbon emissions.

Likewise, global warming
will probably slightly increase malaria, but CO2 reductions will be far
less effective at fighting this disease than mosquito nets and
medication, which can cheaply save 850,000 lives every year. By
contrast, the expensive Kyoto Protocol will prevent just 1,400 deaths
from malaria each year.

While we worry about the far-off effects
of climate change, we do nothing to deal with issues facing the planet
today. This year, malnutrition will kill almost 4 million people. About
3 million lives will be lost to HIV/AIDS, and 2 1/2 million people will
die because of indoor and outdoor air pollution. A lack of
micronutrients and clean drinking water will claim 2 million lives each.

With
attention and money in scarce supply, we should first tackle the
problems with the best solutions, doing the most good throughout the
century. If we focus on solving today's problems, we will leave
communities strengthened, economies more vibrant, and infrastructures
more robust. This will enable these societies to deal much better with
future problems - including global warming. Committing to massive cuts
in carbon emissions will leave future generations poorer and less able
to adapt to challenges.

And just to state the ought-to-be-obvious - Lomborg has parted company (as have I) with the folks who argue that humans have not contributed to global warming. His position is that, to whatever extent we have, global warming is just one of many problems and that making it a top priority would be a major mis-allocation of resources.

Let me note again - folks who hide behind Lomborg this may be establishing the best as the enemy of the good. It's all very well to say that the world's money would be better spent on malaria prevention and third-world water treatment than on global warming, but if, at day's end, no money is spent on either, well, then... maybe it's Mission Accomplished!

OK, as I trail off here, let me revert to Krugman's original column:

Everything I’ve just said should be uncontroversial — but imagine the
reception a Republican candidate for president would receive if he
acknowledged these truths at the next debate. Today, being a good
Republican means believing that taxes should always be cut, never
raised. It also means believing that we should bomb and bully foreigners, not negotiate with them.

Hmm- was it only a few weeks ago that Greg Mankiw, currently advising Mitt Romney, advocated for a revenue-neutral carbon tax as a blunt instrument with which to bludgeon global warming into submission as if it were a helpless baby seal (or a Frenchman)? Not exactly - the baby seal extrapolation was my own Republo-speak, in a mad attempt to create some appeal. But Mankiw did write the rest!

So let me recap - at one time Krugman thought Gore's grasp of economics was dismal, yet he now derides those who still think so. And, contra Krugman, the Republican ice cap on global warming is breaking up. How about that.

MR. ROMNEY: ...But with regards to energy -- and that's really the heart of what we're
describing here -- one side of this is, of course, the fear; the fear
of the fact that we face global warming, that we face serious
competitive challenges globally unless we become serious with getting
prices of energy down. But the other is the opportunity. It's a great
opportunity for America to develop technology to lead the world in
energy efficiency as well as energy production. And whether it's
nuclear or liquefied coal, where we sequester the CO2, far more fuel-
efficient automobiles -- by the way, where bureaucrats don't write the
rules, but where business people come together and say let's find a way
to make sure that the American -- the domestic industry can thrive.
These are some of the incentives that have to be behind our policies
with regards to our investments --

Krugman has the nasty habit of imputing the worst possible motives to those with whom he disagrees. I thought the WSJ editors took the high road by not criticizing Gore, just listing those they thought (more) deserving. If they had sarcastically listed bin Laden, that would have been one thing, but all of their choices seemed reasonable. Krugman is way off base (as usual).

The introduction of tradable permits was an important feature of the 1990 revision of the Clean Air Act, for example, and both fees and permits have been crucial in efforts to protect the ozone layer...

Lay, a member of the Union of Concerned Scientists, a radical environmentalist and anti-free-market organization, supported the disastrous Kyoto Accords on "global warming." Enron had banked on trading permits for carbon dioxide emissions, which would have been based upon the existing permit system for sulfur dioxide emissions from coal-burning electric power plants. When the Bush administration refused to sign the Kyoto treaty, however, Enron was left out in the cold

Nice to know that Krugman can be rented-how much was his consulting contract with Enron anyway? Maybe JOM can scrounge up a few dollars and get Krugman to say a few nice things about this blog [or maybe even comment here].

"And just to state the ought-to-be-obvious - Lomborg has parted company (as have I) with the folks who argue that humans have not contributed to global warming."

Oh, me too!! Who can deny the consensus of the brilliant If the data don't fit -you must omit! crowd. I'm down for the "A" component of AGW having a scientifically derived value of .000000025% for the period of 1975-1998. The current AGC (Anthropogenic Global Cooling - began in 1999)- "A" component is already being deduced by reference to the 1953-1974 "New Ice Age" data which was used to promulgate the concept that human activity was going to freeze the globe.

I propose that climatology be renamed "Kelvinball" in honor of its dedication to everchanging rules of spurious correlation. I know that it takes dedication to ignore the role of solar cycles in temperature fluctuation but it's a real necessity. Otherwise you might sail right off the edge of the earth.

Kyoto was signed by Clinton, but not ratified by the Senate. Bush had nothing to do with it he wasn't president only a governor.
Clinton didn't even submit it for ratification. Since it was never ratified Bush could not have pulled out in 2001. For three years after signing the treaty the Clinton administration refused to ask the Senate for a vote. And now Bush gets blamed for pulling out? Come on people!

Excellent work, TM. But as I said before, he leaves openings the size of basketball fields for you to play with. (Rick, I'm tied up, but I bet AT would love a blog on TM's post).

Look at this "And now that Mr. Bush has proved himself utterly the wrong man for the job — to be, in fact, the best president Al Qaeda’s recruiters could have hoped for " This, on the day the WaPo admits AQ is all but destroyed in Iraq which was supposed to be its field of dreams.

I think Bush revoked the presidential signature of Kyoto. Could be wrong but probably would be an easy fact to check. Anyway, I am confident that within the next 20 or so years the planet once again will begin to cool as it continues the usual cycles it goes through and all of this will look quite idiotic. Who remembers the "nuclear winter" not so long ago? The MSM of course will act as if nothing ever happened and find some other supposed debacle to go hysterical over.

More important to me today are the machinations in Congress by mainly the Dems to further infuriate Turkey with their irresponsible genocide resolution at a critical time in Iraq. Guess if Turkey won't let our supply routes stay open the Dems will have their problem solved for them. They won't have to vote to end funding. The Washington Post Sunday had a great editorial on how we are actually winning in Iraq now. If a left-leaning outfit like the Post can publish that, the results must be even more impressive than they say. Of course, the sad New York Times is another story all together.

I think Bush revoked the presidential signature of Kyoto. Could be wrong but probably would be an easy fact to check. Anyway, I am confident that within the next 20 or so years the planet once again will begin to cool as it continues the usual cycles it goes through and all of this will look quite idiotic. Who remembers the "nuclear winter" not so long ago? The MSM of course will act as if nothing ever happened and find some other supposed debacle to go hysterical over.

More important to me today are the machinations in Congress by mainly the Dems to further infuriate Turkey with their irresponsible genocide resolution at a critical time in Iraq. Guess if Turkey won't let our supply routes stay open the Dems will have their problem solved for them. They won't have to vote to end funding. The Washington Post Sunday had a great editorial on how we are actually winning in Iraq now. If a left-leaning outfit like the Post can publish that, the results must be even more impressive than they say. Of course, the sad New York Times is another story all together.

I saw an article some months ago that said sea levels haven't changed appreciably in 50 years, despite a lot of greenhouse gassing. It astounds me how easily and how thoroughly so many have fallen for that BS--and then they snicker at traditional (non-muslim) religion.

The contrast in derangements is edifying. Bush and Co. have successfully administered the world's largest and most powerful organization for nearly eight years, during which time Gore has been seduced by phony science and grandiose ambition to invent the most outrageous religious fraud of all time.

WPXI ^ | October 15, 2007 | Unknown
PITTSBURGH -- Rescue crews freed a woman trapped under a sport utility vehicle in Brookline late Monday morning. Police said the woman, whose name has not been released, feared her husband was cheating on her. They said she went to spy on him by crawling under an SUV outside her husband’s alleged girlfriend’s house in the 1300 block of Oakridge Street. She apparently fell asleep under the vehicle and became trapped after someone let the air out of the tires. The couple has been married for 26 years. The woman was taken into custody to undergo a mental health evaluation....

"The human impact on the atmosphere is simply too small to have a major effect on global temperatures," Dr Gray said.

He said his beliefs had made him an outsider in popular science.

"It bothers me that my fellow scientists are not speaking out against something they know is wrong," he said. "But they also know that they'd never get any grants if they spoke out. I don't care about grants."

That's why it's important to be specific - put it at ".000000025% for the period of 1975-1998" and you, too, can have a foot on both sides of the street. You don't even have to enhansenize any data to make the statement - change the number of 0's as necessary to fit today's temperature and - viola! - you too can sit with the watermelons.

If there is such a thing as Gore Derangement Syndrome, I have it.
I had it even before a band of rogue judges in Florida tried twice to illegally award Gore the Presidency and were twice stopped by SCOTUS.

The cause of my infection was and is Mr. Gore's disdain for the facts. Whether he is discussing in motherinlaw's prescriptions or future climate, he just doesn't seem to regard the facts as a very important part of the discussion.

I peeked over at Climate Audit and the de-construction of the AGW myth continues apace. Interesting that Krugman dismisses out-of-hand the egregious flaws in Hansen's research and is incurious as to why a government scientist would need such an expansive pr operation. I wonder if he would be as incurious if some DARPA scientist or a military officer, working in a reasonably controversial field, were given a full platform by the American Enterprise Institute to discuss his work.

Also, Gore could have run in 2004 and choose not to [IIRC he endorsed Dean before that campaign imploded on the doorstep of x-Pres Carter in Plains GA]. He could run for the 2008 nomination but it doesn't seem likely he will.

The stuff with AGW is really just getting dull. US environmental policy is on auto-pilot and when Gore was in office there were no new initiatives [Kyoto was the outgrowth of more than a decade of work at the international level]. The other big issue was the Gore Commission on Airline Saftey and Security-bang up job there.

I am confident that within the next 20 or so years the planet once again will begin to cool as it continues the usual cycles it goes through and all of this will look quite idiotic. Who remembers the "nuclear winter" not so long ago? The MSM of course will act as if nothing ever happened ...

No, the MSM will latch on to some policy that they'll claim reduced the acceleration of carbon dioxide production, or something, and thereby turned the tide on global warming.

To be good at satire, you have be to be self-aware. A failing that Krugman exhibits
when he cites Roosevelt's comments about
"bad economics and self-interest". As Amity Schlaes points out, Roowevelt's Brain trust
(Tugwell, Cohen, Hopkins) were deeply im
pressed by Stalinist Russia's policies; and to a lesser extent, Italy's corporativist experiments. Their applications of such policies preceded by Hoover's boondoggles like the RFC and the Smoot Hartley 'economic
turniquet' turned a sharper recesssion than the 1919-20 and the 1893-1895 ones, that had political backlashes; the Boulangerists and anarchists in France, that fed the Dreyfus case. social
disruptions in Spain, that led to the
death of Canovas and the Spanish American
War; Coxey's army and the Bryan/ Watson
movement along with the entrenchment of Jim Crow but nowhere as chronic as what we saw
in the 30s. Now Krugman is using a 1930s appeal for Gore's extreme austerity measures
to deal with what is really a potential threat far in the future.

Can we, just for a moment, step back and remember that there is some actual science behind all this? I realize that it gets, like, all complicated and stuff, but there really isn't any particular controversy that there has been several degrees of warming since the bottom of the Little Ice Age; the evidence is pretty decent that the CO2 content in the air has increased in the last hundred or so years; and there's a decent agreement between theory and observation to make plausible a connection between the increasing CO2 and part of the increase in temperature, and that number is well in excess of 2.5e-11 degrees.

(Roger Pielke Sr made an estimate that it accounted for 30 percent of the observed increase --- but remember, that's the different between a range of, roughly, 300 kelvins to 303 kelvins, or 300 kelvins to 302 kelvins. These are actually small numbers, and big error bars.)

But I really don't know of anyone who has anything like the technical background to be entitled to an opinion who doesn't think there has been some global warming, and that some part of that has been anthropogenic, and some part of that part has been due to greenhouse gases in general, and to CO2 in particular.

All that said, there's no question that Hansen's practices with his data, and his major relationship with Gore's political activities, make his specific calculations questionable, and there's no longer any real question but that Mann et al used data massaging techniques that dramatically overstate the change in rate of increase they showed in the "hockey stick" papers. McKittridge and McIntyre demonstrated it pretty forcefully, Wegman et al confirmed it.

But notice that M&M don't dispute the notion that there has been some warming, and that it was to some degree anthropogenic.

That doesn't excuse Gore --- he took what science there was, used absolute worst cases, exaggerations, and a couple of flat out lies to build a propaganda campaign.

But the fact that Gore is making up shit doesn't mean that we're excused from trying to cope with the reality of the situation.

decent agreement between theory and observation to make plausible a connection between the increasing CO2 and part of the increase in temperature

The theory and observation seems to run the other way also. CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is also a response to ocean temperatures. It is as plausible that the increase in atmospheric CO2 is a result of the warming trend as far back as the middle ages warming.

There is a rough correlation (factor of 2 IIRC) betweem the CO2 increase and the total amount released by human use of fossil fuels. Another POV is that the CO2 flux is so great that the humman cummulative argument is comparable to suggesting that the reason the air conditioner is running a little over the nominal setting is the residual heat from baking Christmas cookies last year based on the observation that the numbers are within a factor of 2.

Gerlich and Tscheuschner have shown that the IPCC conception of Carbon Dioxide greenhouse warming is unphysical. Basically, it requires the transmission of heat from a hot upper stratosphere through a cool lower stratosphere to a warmer troposphere. This violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Carbon Dioxide does have a trace greenhouse effect, much less than expected by the IPCC.

Global temperature is most determined by cloud cover, most determined by cosmic rays generating cloud forming units, the cosmic rays most determined by the earth's gravitational field, most determined by the sun's gravitational field, determined by the wobble of the sun around the center of gravity of the solar system.

But I really don't know of anyone who has anything like the technical background to be entitled to an opinion who doesn't think there has been some global warming, and that some part of that has been anthropogenic, and some part of that part has been due to greenhouse gases in general, and to CO2 in particular.

Perhaps so, Charlie, but even if it is a reality as you describe, it doesn't strike me as one that needs much coping with - even assuming there's anything we can do about it. A part of a part of a part could be a tiny, even a negligible, amount. Surely we can all agree that it would be disastrously unwise to build economic policy on such speculation, as Gore and others would like us to do. Especially given other, more pressing world problems demanding our attention....

"Especially given other, more pressing world problems demanding our attention...."

Damn straights - the World Health Organization still has millions and millions and millions of little brown, black and yellow children left to kill through restrictive policies on the use of DDT. If Margaret Sanger don't get 'em Rachel Carson will.

The best use of DDT is probably painted on interior surfaces, and the practice is spreading, I believe. The process of most effectively using DDT has been retarded politically, and millions have died.
===========================

I'm not sure that's the "best" use, Kim. It's the only use allowed by the WHO if you want to export to the EU though:

"Along with neighboring Tanzania and Ethiopia, Uganda is planning to resume indoor spraying of homes with DDT, widely acknowledged as the most effective insecticide against mosquitoes. “There has been a lot of debate and claims that countries using DDT won’t be able to export agricultural products to the European Union,” Dr. Nduhura mused.

“However the EU has made it very clear that as long as regulations of the Stockholm Convention of the WHO are followed, they have no problems with use of DDT for vector control. In Uganda, we don’t intend to depart from the convention and, all things remaining equal, we intend to start using DDT in areas for vector control by the end of June this year.”

Fogging puddles around villages after a rain would do more than painting walls in houses with no glass in the windows, let alone screens.

It is difficult to determine best use. Certainly, DDT has been underused. That also means that there is less resistance now than there would have been otherwise, keeping it now more effective than it would have been had Rachel Carson never lived.
==========================================

Conventional wisdom in Washington seems to be that Democrats framed the SCHIP debate correctly and made Bush*s proposed expansion look like a cut. But a poll by Gallup for USA Today found 52% back the president*s plan and only 40% back the Democratic plan.

Oops.

USA Today reported: *Democrats, labor unions and liberal advocacy groups have been running TV and radio ads in more than 20 congressional districts in an effort to sway Republicans* votes. So far, the campaign has not made a difference.*

~~

I think that is really very good news - (along with harry Reid's popularity poll in Nevada). It indicates that the public is not as ill informed as they generally appear to be, at least on this issue.

Nuke enough of China that we cripple their economy, cut all the nasty CO2 emissions, and get a little blast of nuclear winter. As an added bonus, we can re-industrialize and bring back all those mills. Pittsburgh and Buffalo can be smoggy again.

Judging by Hansen's little kerfuffle over his data, I say AGW stands for Adjusted Global Warming.

OK, I'll shut up and stop trying to save the world with ridiculous prescriptions for disaster. Will Gore and Krugman join me?

And the reality of the situation is that the weather changes will continue, as they always have, with only an insignificant contribution by Man.

So WTF is the problem with that?

The problem is twofold:

(1)with whatever warming/cooling there is there will be climate change whose effects will have to be mitigated.

(2)if we deny warming/climate change nobody will listen to us and therefore it is more likely THEIR policies will be put in place.

Bjorn Lomborg seems to have tackled BOTH in his latest book. He's no longer denying AGW (he says it's a problem, not a catastrophe) but he argues that reducing carbon emissions is

(1)too expensive as of now and wouldn't allow the world to become richer and more able to solve the problems of climate change and

(2)will give us only an extra five years to reach the proposed global temp in 2100. IOW if every country on the planet signed and actually met their obligations under Kyoto (which he says is impossible) we have 'til 2105 for the temp to reach whatever it's supposed to reach in 2100.

We can use our money to better purposes, like altering the heat island effect of cities by simply painting the parking lots (::grin::) and adding more parks. We can fight AIDS, France SHOULD get more A/C in Paris, we can stop shooting polar bears if we're so worried.

He also says lay off China and India so much. Especially China's lousy environment practices. Lomborg says the same criticisms were aimed at Japan in the fifties but when Japan became richer they took care of their environment just fine. The same will occur in China.

IOW people adjust as things change and they can adjust better and easier if they're not broke and are allowed to increase their wealth without the drag of the absurd cost of Kyoto.

At the same time we should invest in R&D and he proposes an amount that is perhaps 1/10th of the costs we'd incur under Kyoto. It costs $20 now for a return of $2 for every ton of carbon we try to eliminate. If we invest in R&D that cost can be brought down significantly with new technologies in the future.

I watched his presentation twice on C-SPAN and chuckled at all the questions from the Seattle audience. Anyway, I was impressed.

Lance Dutson of MaineWebReport is in a kerfuffle with Google. I believe Google is politically perverted, manually and by automation, but don't know what the solution is.
=================================

I hesitate to mention this, because I wrote it as a joke, but there is another explanation of the disagreement between the earlier Krugman and the later Krugman. In 2003, I suggested, jokingly, that the columns were written by a graduate student, who was trying to discredit Krugman (with considerable success).

It's a joke, but it does explain many things that need explaining, such as the methodological errors in many Krugman columns, and the shifts in position like the one Tom documented here. (The earlier piece was written by the real Krugman, not the graduate student.)

Incidentally, President Bush has more than once accepted global warming as a problem and said that he believes it is partly caused by humans. He has called for industry to take voluntary action to reduce emissions. And he has pushed for a switch to nuclear power. (To the best of my knowledge, Gore is still not willing to back nuclear power as as a partial solution to the problem.)

Just for the sake of edification, greenhouse gases include several different elements. Co2 is not the largest by any means. That distinction goes to water vapor, I believe. And methane is another greenhouse gas.

When they come for my steak, they will have to pry my cold dead fingers from the fork!

Incidentally, President Bush has more than once accepted global warming as a problem and said that he believes it is partly caused by humans.

I was aware of that as I'm sure most of the commentors here are. I'm not sure what your point is. Just because Bush supports it doesn't mean I, or anyone else posting here, automatically falls in line. But maybe I'm just misunderstanding your point.

"Incidentally, President Bush has more than once accepted global warming as a problem and said that he believes it is partly caused by humans."

He didn't do it during any speeches on calling for rebuilding New Orleans, did he? 'Cause that would just be a bit too much wrt pandering.

The President offers the heel of the loaf as supplication on damn near any subject that anyone can dream of, from prescription drugs for geezers to expanding CHIP to rebuilding a city which is already below a "rising" sea level. At least a little patter on voluntary action won't increase the deficit.

When the President announces a crash program to build half as many reactors as China currently has on order I will assume that he has moved beyond the compromise and posture stage.

Sue - My comments on Bush's views on global warming were meant only to extend Tom's refutation of what Krugman had said about the Republican position. In other words, Tom could have added Bush to McCain and Romney (with some qualifications). I was not saying that Bush was right or wrong, just that Krugman was even more wrong than Tom was saying.

For my own, moderately complex, views on global warming, see this disclaimer. (I'll have to update it soon to add some new information, but it is still a fair summary of my views.)

That's a really excellent piece. The only point in which I would beg to differ is: "We also should be looking for ways to reverse climate change, should it occur." I differ with that because my ability to conceptualize a 'perfect' climate are fairly limited. I guess I'm still too tickled with Eric the Red's promotion of Newfoundland as the Napa Valley of the 10th century.

I'd really rather not see us "fix" our way into the Maunder Minimum - even if it meant lovely pictures of ice skating parties on the Thames.

Thanks for the link. I can only say once bitten, twice shy. Normally when Bush is used to point out something to conservatives it is with the intent of obeying the leader, or something along those lines. Sorry I jumped before bitten.

As Rick and I mentioned, in his last speech, Bush declined skepticism and coercion, kicking the issue down the road.

Excellent, Jim. Until I became enamored of the cosmic ray theory I believed we have been kept on the cusp of permanent glaciation by the virtually irreversible sequestration of carbon by the action of the sun on plants and animals. It may be high time something besides vulcanic action releases the active fertilizer, carbon dioxide, from its restraints.
===============================

I've read the IPCC reports and thought they were interesting statements of the knowns and unknowns but on the whole, no fixed conclusion could be drawn. The remaining unknowns and lack of modeling performance are just too great for expensive action. Therefore, I'm neutral on GW.

I will say that maybe at current CO2 levels human influence doesn't rise above natural noise but what if we tripled the concentrations? Of course, a problem with that thought experiment is that one has to devise a path where all sorts of feedbacks both positive and negative could occur.

In "An Inconvenient Truth" Gore does not use the word "nuclear" but he does visually show a nuclear explosion - a pretty blatant propoganda move, IMHO. The fact that Gore stigmitizes nuclear when that is the only real substitute to burning fossil fuels should be a guide as to his judgment.

As a nuclear engineer I do NOT want to advocate for nuclear power based on any argument or association with GW. I strongly suspect that the GW crowd will crash and burn on poor science, heavy handed politicking, and exposed hidden agenda. I don't want to be associated with the GW crowd - neither their proposals nor their methods.

Yup. And the reality of the situation is that the weather changes will continue, as they always have, with only an insignificant contribution by Man.

So WTF is the problem with that?

Um, well, no, Les, the reality is that we don't really *know* how much of a contribution we've got --- but if you think we're having a completely insignificant contribution, look up urban heat islands.

But then the Goreans are trying to say we're having the *dominant* effect --- and I don't think that can be justified either.

As to the problem with that, the big one is that if we insist on listening to people's fantasies instead of working out what can be confirmed, it will eventually bite us on the ass. It always does.

Rick - Thanks for your kind words. And you are right about that sentence; I'll have to revise it when I update the post.

Incidentally, I have found that disclaimer (and others on other subjects) very useful in blogging. Before I put it up I noticed that whenever I wrote a post that mentioned global warming I tended to add a paragraph or so of hedging -- which detracted from the posts. Now, I just add a line at the end, mentioning the disclaimer.

what happened in 2000, ... the often hysterical denigration of Mr. Gore

I find this comment just amazing... Does Krugman think we weren't here 7 years ago? Does he think we are all senile? I remember Gore in 2000 quite well. He gave an utterly masterful totally statesmanlike concession speech which showed a side that he had successfully kept hidden for the previous 9-or-so-years. (Taranto's theory is that deep down in his gut, Gore does not want to be president, and that we know this because his concession speech was the moment when we saw him most comfortable and happy with himself.) Then Gore dropped out of the public eye for the next couple of years.

"Often hysterical denigration"? Get real, Paul. During those years what we did most often was not think about Gore at all. When we did think about him, it was to express admiration for the quite admirable character that we had seen last. The giggling didn't start until the beard, and the packing on the pounds, and the wild-eyed tent-revival-preacher-of-global-doom act.

" Um, well, no, Les, the reality is that we don't really *know* how much of a contribution we've got --- but if you think we're having a completely insignificant contribution, look up urban heat islands. "

Um, Charlie, I guess I was just responding to your initial condescending tone ( "..I realize that it gets, like, all complicated and stuff,...etc.." ) where you sound like a junior high-schooler, or you sound like you were talking to junior high-schoolers.

I think anyone on this thread thinks the climate is changing, as its always done for tens of millions of years. We'd like to see some proof before we believe something so insignificant as 'mankind' can actually wreck the climate, or even affect it in any significant way. Bring proof or go away is what we're saying to the Goreists.

Something no one talks about is that there are environmental tradeoffs, too. So you build hybrid cars, which significantly cut the amount of CO2 emissions. But building the batteries and disposing of them causes some small but real increase in things we all agree are pollutants -- nasty chemicals in the air, water, etc. If CO2 is not bad at all, then a hybrid car is a net polluter. If CO2 is bad, then the extra little bit of other pollution is worth it to lower CO2 emissions.

There is no free lunch, even if you assume that money doesn't matter you still have tradeoffs in the strictly environmental impacts.

cahty, It has been true for decades that the arguments re energy have been disingenuous, with those arguing for alternate energy sources regularly downplaying the costs and dangers. Think of how much energy is used to make solar panels! All that aluminum and glass.

Paul Krugman equates fact-based criticism -- yay, even ridicule -- of Gore's global warm-mongering to the irrational hatred and name calling hurled by Krugman himself and his radical left ilk against W. The derangement, dear libs, is not in Gore's critics, but in you who cling to his every pronouncement as if it were revealed wisdom. It is you who are suffering from Gore Derangement Syndrome. Paul Krugman, look in the mirror.